Usually, people are not aware of requisite tactics for search engine optimization. With respect to blog optimization, they often fall a prey to certain loopholes. I would like to discuss these common SEO mistakes here. A proper knowledge of these mistakes will make you adept in SEO techniques and thus facilitate an easy uninterrupted traffic to your blog.

Negligence to search engine basics

This is probably the biggest blunder any blogger can make. SEO includes a set of guidelines to improve your search engine rankings. Thus, you must check out the proposed search engine’s quality and relative guidelines to boost your traffic building efficiency.

Lack of an effective keyword strategy

Very often, people misunderstand the essence of keywords. They end up targeting numerous keywords in their articles. Consequently, per head success of each keyword is considerably reduced. To avoid the same problem, you must devise an effective keyword strategy as per your blog structure. Use keywords that match in well with the actual topics and content you are looking for instead of using sheer representatives of the content. a good keyword strategy ensures a quick linking to your blog.

Neglecting the title tags (H1, H3,H4,H2)

This is another common error. You must not ignore HTML tags under any condition. These tags not only serve as optimization tools but also assist the reader in following the structure of the post and corresponding ideas. Use of strong keywords in the tags also helps in better directions for search engines, thereby enforcing relevancy.

Confining entire focus on single optimization element

Some people end up concentrating too much on limited aspects of optimization like optimizing the titles or the content, or the Meta tags.

This is where they restrict an uninterrupted search engine optimization. Whenever you have finalized your keywords, you must optimize your content, page title, subheading, Meta tags and links. Optimization is complete only when you include all aspects of the same. if your page is more consistent with respect to optimization, it has better chances of securing higher ranking.

SEO is not a one time affair

Once you are through with your page optimization, do not assume that your work has been done. Optimization is a process that requires regular research and updating. It incorporates hit and trial, research and re-researches. You must keep a timely check at your webpage and its rankings. Regular use of search engine algorithms, adjustment of key word strategy and the requisite optimization tactics can ensure a high traffic to your blog.

These are the chief mistakes, which disrupt the usual optimization process. You must restrain from committing the same if you want to build a high visitor-frequency to your blog.

“Article taken from key2seo.com/blog”

So now with many other factors you have to consider speed of your web pages.  We also think speed is important as in todays busy world no one has time to wait for minutes for your webpage to load. But have one question in mind? If site A loads faster then site B does it means site A’s ranking should be higher no matter site B has more information and is more qualified to be on higher rank. Well what we understand is Google will just pay some % of over all factors to be considered for ranking. So dont worry if some data is taking more time to load but is must dont just go and remove it. Instead try soem other ways to optimize the same data in different format etc.

Last Google Toolbar PR update was in April, so this one came a little early I guess.

There are no official tweets/news from Google to confirm this, but it should be coming soon.

But check out if your site got new PR

Usual Coding Patterns in WordPress Themes

If you’re somewhat familiar with the WordPress themes, and you’ve taken a look at your theme files. Blog pages are provided through a partnership of a few names with standard PHP files (index.php, archive.php, single.php), with different templates issue, based on the type of content.

The index.php file usually means your home page, is also able to substitute any other model that has not already been defined. Therefore, if you do not have a template for the search results (search.php), index files and will make your search results page.

Each of these templates include small pieces of code to create the final result. The most used are header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php.

For now, we will restrict our attention to the following files in the folder of your theme:

• header.php
• index.php
• single.php
• page.php (not every theme has it)
• archive.php, search.php (not every theme has them)

Optimizing the Header File

Having your primary keyword present at the top of you page it’s very important.
Considering the fact that most themes come with text based logos instead of graphics, we’ll be looking for the <h1> tag in the header.php file.

If you look at the WordPress default theme will find this piece of code, close to the end of the file:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>

The first line displays your blog’s title into a link to the homepage, inside the H1 tag.
The second line displays your blog’s description.

H1 is the most important heading style and the coding recommendations state that only one should be used per page. When talking about a homepage, archive page or search results, it’s best that we optimize these pages according to our main keywords, therefore this H1 tag is required.

But what about on the single post pages? When we display single post, we would want to have their pages optimized according to their content, not the overall keywords of the blog. This is where the H1 should be removed from the header.php file, and placed instead of the H2 surrounding the posts title, to give make it more visible and representative in the eyes of a search engine spider.

How do we do that? First we need to add some conditional tags in the header.
Look for the piece of code that I’ve listed above and replace it with this one:

<?php if(is_single() OR is_page()) {
// On single post pages and static pages we use this code
?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php }
else {
// On home page and archive style pages we use this code
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php } ?>

By using some WordPress conditional tags we managed to limit the use of the H1 HTML tag to all archive style pages (including the homepage).

Next, we move to single posts and static pages to continue our optimization.

Optimizing the Single Posts and Static Pages

After we’ve made the changes in the header file, we need to apply some modifications to the single.php and page.php files to make their titles more search engine friendly.

Open the default theme’s single.php file and look for this piece of code:

<h2><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Remember that I’ve told you we are allowed to used <h1> only once per file, for our most important title / phrase. Since we’ve eliminated the use of <h1> on single posts and static pages in the header.php, now, all we have to do is to change <h2> and </h2> with <h1> and </h1>, just like this:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

There you go, now your most important phrase on a single post page is the post’s title, as it should be!
Most themes don’t come with this type of heading importance separation and by following this guide you’ll be able to fix this issue on your own with no trouble at all.

While the default theme does not have a page.php template defined, you could clone the single.php file and rename it. If you don’t clone it, the index.php file will be used to display static pages, which means you’ll list page titles using the <h2> instead of <h1>.

Consider Using Subheadings in Your Posts

For further SEO improvement, you should consider using relevant subheadings inside your post to evidentiate different parts of your post’s structure.
Write down your article and when you’re finished, switch to HTML view and add <h3> & </h3> around you subheadings, like this:

<h3>This Is a Subheading</h3>

Final Thoughts

Usually, titles are the most important links on your blog. Through them, users and spiders alike navigate through your content. Use them smart and effectively.
If you have any questions or need further help with this, feel free to drop a comment.
Also, join me again next Sunday for a new post in the Blog Seo Tips series.

Let’s say you’ve optimized your home page and/or post page for some keywords, but still search engines refuse to index you higher and searches for those keywords aren’t providing you with any visitors. Most probably, that’s because your content is not relevant in relationship with the provided keywords. At this time, you have 2 choices:

1. Rethink your website’s keyword list and meta tags

Scan through your posts, find the most common and relevant keywords and modify your keywords meta tag accordingly. Use these keywords in the page’s title tag and for the description try to get a small paragraph that uses in a logic and readable way the provided keywords. The closer this description comes to a text paragraph available on the page, the more relevant it will be.

2. Rebuild your most recent content around the old keywords.

This option is the most time-consuming, but if you know you’ve got a good keyword list, with good search engine results (only not for you), then it should worth the effort. Always keep in mind how much competition you have for that keyword list, and how powerful that competition is. Otherwise you’re efforts will be in vain. It’s always better to fight for 1.000 relevant results and get the most of it, that for 10.000.000 results and get none.

Once you’ve done one of the above steps, the best thing you can do is to check the results with one of the following free available online SEO tools:

DomainTools.com – The Whois tool available on this domain provides users with a SEO rating of the queried domain, as well as with a SEO browser to analyze you page from a search engine’s point of view. It also makes suggestions on the things that still need to be done to increase your SEO score.

SEOCentro.com – SEO Centro provides user with a very helpful, free online meta tag analyzer. This way you can learn more about your meta tags, their relevance and also the most popular keywords found in your blog’s content.

There are of course many more online SEO tools, but these 2 should be enough to help you find your way around your blog’s SEO.

Manual Related Links

Tired of the old and sometimes irrelevant automated “Related posts”. This new WordPress plugin allows you to hand pick the links to be displayed at the end of your posts. Also works with off site links. Some might think that it’s a waste of time, other like me will see the value in giving the reader really relevant, hand-picked links.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Aaron D. Campbell

WP htaccess Control

No need to access the FTP or the cPanel anymore to add rules to your .htaccess file. With WP htaccess Control you get to do that from the comfort of your WP Admin screen.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: António Andrade aka Dardna

Magazine Columns

This is a cool WordPress plugin for all you “magazine-style” fans out there. Ever wanted you posts to be displayed split into 2, 3 or more columns, just like in a newspaper? By adding a shorttag – <!–column–> into your posts you’ll be able to do so. Easy to use, nice result.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Chris Bavota

Pretty Links

“Pretty Links” is a nice little plugin that allows you to setup custom URLs on your blog to act as either short URLs or affiliate marketing links. Also features click statistics.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7.1+
Author: Blair Williams

Template Tag Shortcodes

Justin Tadlock, author of the cool Query Posts plugin gives us yet a new useful tool for our blog. The “Template Tag Shortcodes” does exactly what the name says. It takes WordPress’ template tags that you usually use in your hardcoded templates and transforms them into shortcodes that you can also use in you blog posts and pages, in the admin screen. Really cool, and supports over 40 template tags and growing.
Download hereWP Version: 2.5+
Author: Justin Tadlock

Post Snippets

This plugin comes in handy when dealing with post series and recurring snippets of code and text in your blog posts. Setup new snippets of HTML code via the plugin admin page, then call them in you posts through a small button that’s added to you post edit TinyMCE editor.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Johan Steen

Important

As all of these plugins are recently released, I would advise some testing before going live. If you have access to a local server of test version of your blog, try using these plugins there first.

We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike.

Ever since sitemaps where added, the Google Webmaster Tools became more and more used and useful, many new features being added over the time.

How do sitemaps help you?

Based on the main reasons that lead to this successful “experiment”, sitemaps are meant to improve the way your website is indexed and crawled by the GoogleBot.

Furthermore, through the Webmaster Tools interface and using sitemaps, you have access to vital information such as pages that could not be crawled, broken links, search queries that returned your website’s content, queries that drove traffic to your website and many more features worth discovering and using.

How do I build a XML sitemap?

As a blogger, you should not worry about that. Arne Brachhold developed a wonderful WordPress plugin that is very easy to manage and automatically generates a standards-compliant XML sitemap based on your blog’s structure. This is one plugin that I include in every WordPress blog I create or administrate, so, from my point of view, it’s one that I “could not live without”, so I highly recommend it.

Download Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin here.

Once you have the sitemap ready, it’s time to upload it to your Google Webmaster Tools account. In order to access these tools, all you need is a Google account. You can use your Gmail login info to access them.

Google Webmaster Tools

As soon as you log in to your account you’ll be taken to your dashboard. Here you can select through already existing website profiles, add new ones, add sitemaps and confirm your administrative rights (verify) for those websites.

Once you’ve added a new profile using the form on the top of the table – as indicated in the above screenshot – it’s time to verify your site. In the table, you’ll see your new website with two links beside it. One to add a sitemap and one to verify it. Click on the verify link and you’ll be taken to a new screen:

Here, you’ll be provided with 2 verification methods:

• By adding a specific, unique META tag to your website’s header;
• By uploading a HTML file into the root FTP folder of your website.

It’s up to you to decide which method will you use, the results are the same.

Now that your site has been verified, you can add the previously generated sitemap to its profile, either by clicking the “Add” link, near the website name on the dashboard, or by navigating the left side menu to Sitemaps -> Add a sitemap. Both methods will take you to this screen:

From the initial drop down menu select “Add General Web Sitemap“. This is the most common selection for text-based-content websites like blogs. In the form below, at point 3, enter the URL of your sitemap. This usually is something like: http://www.youblog.com/sitemap.xml, and click the button to submit it.

Allow some time for Google to process the information of your newly added sitemap. Once the sitemap is approved, your sitemaps dashboard will look like this:

From here, you will gain access to report about your crawling stats, sitemap and website status and many more interesting things that you will be able to access through the options in the left side menu of Google Webmaster Tools.

And that concludes this guide. You should now have your Google Sitemap up and running, nice and easy!

While some of them are free for personal use, others may be subject to a small one time fee for professional use. Please visit their authors’ sites, available at the “Info & Download” link, to learn more about each of these themes.

Several3

Download Here
Preview Here

Modern

modern

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Gluttony

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Whitespace

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

d’sanctuary

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Brown Bound

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Brown Magic

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Yellow 3

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

PointSpace

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Basic

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Zoxengen

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Timeline Digest

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

SunRise

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Corporate Sandbox

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

The Morning After

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Deadwood Lite

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

PolarLight

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Natural Power

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Copyblogger

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

Evolution

Info & Download Here
Preview Here

I know that for many start-up bloggers, the blogs they manage are probably the first contact they had with a website from the role of an administrator, and surely the first contact they had with the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In terms of blog optimization, I have shared with you a few articles in the past that offer a good range of blog SEO tips, so, in case you need to refresh your memory, feel free to go through them again.

The problem is that even with the available information, those new to the concept of SEO tend to try anything and everything, without taking the time to decide what’s best and what could actually damage their rankings. In what follows I’m going to present a list of the top SEO mistakes you must avoid.

SEO Mistake #1 – Ignoring Basic Search Engine Guidelines

From my point of view, this is the biggest mistake a SEO beginner could make. SEO is a set of actions meant to improve search engine rankings, so the most important thing would obviously be to first check out the targeted search engines’ quality and submission guidelines. Here are the links to the guides of two of the most important search engines, Google and Yahoo:

• Google SEO & Quality Guidelines
• Yahoo SEO Guidelines

Any further SEO actions you take should abide by the above guidelines. After all, is their “approval” you’re seeking.

SEO Mistake #2 – Not Having a Keywords Strategy

There is one common mistake that people do and it’s about the way they understand the concept of using keywords. Keywords are not what you would want you’re website to be found for, but what your website could show up for in relation to its content.

I’ve seen hundreds of websites with that keywords META filled with the most incredible and unrelated words and phrases, most times on the homepage. It’s a mistake to target numerous keywords and actually diminishing that chances to succeed with either one of them.

The development of a keyword strategy is done in strong relationship with your blog’s structure. Just like your blog’s homepage is a gateway to more detailed content topics, so should be its keywords and the keywords of its subpages, categories and posts. Focus on choosing keywords that go hand in hand with the actual content and topics you approach rather than keywords that you’d think might be representative.

Work from your homepage downward in your blog structure, going from more general keywords, to very specific keywords as you get to the posts, like in the diagram below:

keywords

Here are 3 past articles you might find useful when it comes to developing and maintaining a keyword strategy:

• How to check and improve your WordPress SEO
• Using Keywords for Blog Optimization
• Advantages of Long Tail Keywords Optimization

SEO Mistake #3 – Ignoring the title tags (H1, H2, H3, H4…)

When writing and publishing blog posts, many ignore these HTML heading tags. You’ve probably seen that I use them in most of my posts, and not only for optimization reasons. They also help your readers better follow the post’s structure and ideas.

Use appropriate keywords inside these tags. The search engine bots give special attention to these headings and continue to “read” your content based on the information found inside them. It builds up relevancy.

Also, a look at how your theme uses heading tags, SEO wise, would do good too.

SEO Mistake #4 – Too much focus on one of the optimization elements

Due to not filtering the incoming information on SEO, some people make the mistake on focusing too much on optimizing the meta tags, or the titles, or the body text of posts. Optimization is a process that should cover all aspects in a very close relationship.

Once you’ve decided which keywords to use, make sure you optimize your page title, META’s, subheading, body text, links, alternate (ALT) text on images and so on. The more consistent the whole page looks in terms of optimization, the better the chances of a higher ranking.

SEO Mistake #5 – SEO is Not a One Time Process

No Sir, it’s not! It’s a matter of trial and error, of research and observation of evolution. Don’t make the mistake of resting at peace once you’ve finished optimizing a page or website. Check the results from time to time, adjust your keyword strategy if necessary. You don’t have to do this only because search engines change algorithms. You have to do it also because you’re definitely not the only one targeting those keywords, assuming you’re targeting competitive ones – otherwise, what’s the point?

Research -> Analize -> Experiment. It’s the only path to success, in any field.

1. Know your geographic market and ensure your domain has the correct TLD.
   If your primary market is the UK it is important to use a .UK TLD and ideally have your domain hosted on UK based servers.
2. Include keyword in Domain name (using hyphens if necessary).
   This doesn’t mean having a domain name like keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com try to stick to the one hyphen and not read as spammy. A good example is a site that sells wheelchair ramps with the URL of the site being www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk
3. Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.
   After doing this divide in to 4 or 5 sections (this will help later when creating your navigation structure)
4. AFTER you have your site content start keyword researching
   There are tools you can use for keyword research; Wordtracker and The Google AdWords Keyword Tool to name but two. I personally use a combination of the Google Keyword Tool, Google LSI and T.J. Common Sense.
5. Decide on 4 or 5 primary keywords to use as main sub-sections
   Ideally have an idea of 4 or 5 main keywords, call them your Primary Keywords and then try to position secondary keywords with the Primary Word most closely associated with it.
6. Sit down and sketch out your navigation system
   Put a lot of time in to this and play around until it is right, use Primary Keyword as headers for 5 main Sub-sections and use secondary keywords as headers for content pages under each Primary Keyword

   

   The above diagram shows the early stages of constructing a navigation system. The green section (Sub-1) shows how all other sub sections will be. The Home page, All 5 Sub-section, About us, Terms, Contact, Privacy, Resources and Sitemap pages are always interlinked with each other forming 12 strong pages (more about this later)

7. Re-write content using knowledge previously gained about keywords and phrases
   This doesn’t mean totally re-writing and stuffing the page with keywords, it requires writing paragraphs ensuring the right phrases are in the right places but isn’t obvious that the phrases are written for the search engines. Do not write too much information on each page and do not stray of in to writing about something else.
8. Structure each individual page
   With your content rich, keyword balanced page written, you now have to create the page structure. Each page should be seen as an individual website.
   Starting from the top,
   • Page title should reflect the content of the Page ensuring you use the primary keyword for that Page
   • Meta keyword tags, (although not overly important), should list 4 or 5 individual keywords related to the Page you have created.
   • Meta Description tags, this should be a short concise description describing what the Page is about. This is very important as a selling point as you can manipulate the search engines in to displaying this when the person searches for the keyword used in the description. A favourite of mine is “Provides information about the latest KEYWORD now in stock and available online” or words suitable for the product.
   • Avoid bloated code by using external style sheets and minimum coding.
   • Main page layout was previously discussed whilst sketching the navigation system, but it is important that all links are seen by the engines and are using the correct anchor text related to the pages they are pointing too. Avoid using javascipt for links and if you have to use images ensure you use the correct alt attributes. If the page has too many links on it and looks messy this can be overcome by using a combination of css and javascript to create drop down boxes, but should only be used if you know what you are doing. If you have the opposite problem, and want to include links on the page but not necessarily have search engines follow them, this can be achieved using drop down option boxes.
   • With yout general layout and your linking structure sorted you should now sort out your headings. The main page heading of the page should use your Keywords and be in H1 Tags, this should be followed by your most important paragraph, ideally working down the page you should use secondary headers from h2 to h4 (always using the keywords if possible)
   • If you have used images on your page ensure keywords in the Alt attributes, this doesn’t mean keyword stuff them but just describe the image using the keyword.
9. Proof read your completed page and get a 2nd opinion
   With your page completed try and get someone to check it for you to see if it reads to spammy and to see if you have missed out any obvious key phrases that should be on the page.
10. Construct your site.
    With the previous procedure completed for all pages it’s now time to put the site together. Simply use the previously devised linking structure, group similar pages together under appropriate sub headings and ensure all links are active and using correct anchor text.